Sunday, January 27, 2008

It is usually very frustrating to copy and edit text from a protected PDF file to a text document and when you find that you can’t. Normally, you can use the text select tool in Adobe PDF reader to highlight and copy the text in a PDF document. I found this free solution on digg when I wanted to copy some ATM FEE rates from a PDF file and found that the protected PDF document didn’t allow me to select any text or numbers that were images.

Here's what I did to get around this issue.

1. Open the Snapshot Tool in Adobe PDF reader (camera icon)

2. Copy the text that you want to edit as an image and paste it into Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

3. Then, here’s the magic part, goto Tools > Recognize text using OCR

Hey, presto you have editable text.

4. Simply highlight the OCR’ed text and paste it into any word processor, like Open Office.

You can then resave it as a PDF file in Open Office after editing.

Isnt it easy to fix some annoying things with the tools that you already have ?